Teaser (Hallie Ahern Mysteries, 3)

Hallie Ahern, a Providence, Rhode Island, reporter and recovering gambling addict, is trawling online chat rooms in search of a story for her newspaper’s Web site when an anonymous source sends her a short video clip, a teaser. Featuring two girls striking provocative poses, the clip promises more to come. As Hallie follows up on the lead, staking out tech shops and high school hangouts in search of the girls in the clip, she discovers that men are buying the girls webcams and lavishing them with gifts to make sure they use them. But those gifts are only a taste of the perils to come.

The paper’s new owners love the idea of an exposé that warns parents of the dangers of the Internet, but when girls start dying, and when Hallie’s boyfriend—a prosecutor with the Attorney General’s office—ends up on another side of the story altogether, the situation goes from dark to lethal.

As Hallie is caught between her responsibilities as a reporter and as a concerned citizen, her investigation leads her deep into a far-reaching conspiracy in Teaser, Jan Brogan’s latest gripping mystery.